If you have you ever held a film projector before, chances are you have probably heard the distinct clacking noise that comes with using it.
The sound comes from the Geneva Drive, a mechanism which gets its name from the 17th century Swiss watches it used to power.
In a video by the Maker’s Muse YouTube channel, they take a look at how the Geneva Drive takes continuous rotational movement and turns it into precise, indexed, movement.
One of the earliest mechanisms which translates index movement, the drive consists of a rotating drive wheel which forcibly locks into one of the driven wheel’s many slots (known as “dwells”). The driven wheel can consist of as little as three slots to a more complex eighteen slots. This hard switching between dwells is what gives the Geneva drive a sound of someone clicking their tongue at a breakneck speed.
While the external Geneva drive is the most popular design, there are variants to the traditional formula. There is the spherical Geneva drive which is set at a 90 degree angle, and a variation to the external drive called the Geneva stop, which locks into place and cannot be moved any further.
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